Behind the buzz of this hot new ingredient

Bee venom’s been getting major buzz (sorry, couldn’t help it!) in the beauty world for its purported abilities to make your lips look like Angelina Jolie’s and give your skin that smooth suppleness you haven’t seen since your twenties. But where the heck is the stuff actually coming from—and does it spell bad news for our hive-dwelling friends?

First, a little background for the uninitiated. Bee venom, (scientific name: apitoxin) is the clear, odorless liquid that’s injected into your skin when a honeybee stings you. It consists of more than 20 known compounds, the most prominent being melittin, a protein that boasts powerful anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and anti-viral properties. In the case of enhancing your epidermis, lip boosters and anti-aging creams use bee venom to trick skin into thinking it’s actually been stung, says Purvisha Patel, MD, a Memphis dermatologist and owner of Advanced Dermatology & Skin Cancer Associates. “This causes the body to direct blood toward the area, stimulating the production of collagen, which strengthens tissue, and elastin, which helps the skin to remain taut and bounce back into shape,” she says.

So far, scientists haven’t been able to recreate bee venom in a lab, says Alex Fras, a beekeeper in British Columbia and founder of the skincare line Bee U Organics. And that means the only way to get the precious liquid is by getting bees—lots of them—to sting. (According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, it takes about a million bee stings to produce just one dry gram of bee venom.) But how do you do that?

Historically, venom collection was lethal to bees, and was performed either by crushing them or by forcing them to sting plastic or rubber surfaces, which caused their stingers to get stuck (a bee dies from stinging only when its stinger is dislodged from its body). The modern method is kinder: Beekeepers start with fabric-covered plates that have conductor wires stretched flat across them. When a bee lands on the plate, the wires deliver a mild electric current that agitates the bee just enough to make it sting, causing the venom to drop onto the plate. Since the fabric on the plate is very thin, it doesn’t trap the stinger the way plastic or rubber used to do, leaving the bee free to fly away unharmed. “More venom is collected when other bees sense the chemical odors of the freshly-released venom, which signals them to start stinging, too,” says Karen Wassmer, a beekeeper and owner of K&W Apiary in Jacksonville, Florida.

And in case you were wondering, collecting bee venom does not contribute to colony collapse disorder, the unusually high levels of hive loss reported by beekeepers beginning in 2006. That’s caused by a cocktail of diseases, parasites, poor nutrition, and environmental stressors like pesticides and limited water access, says the USDA. Fras has noticed that the bees he stimulates for venom even yield more honey than their non-stimulated counterparts. “I don’t know if [the stimulation] has anything to do with it, but we definitely haven’t seen a negative impact [on the bees].”

But even if bee venom collection turns out to be a positive for bees, know that us humans can definitely get too much of a good thing. “We’ve heard of people using bee venom two or three times a day, and that’s not something we recommend. It’s a matter of your personal preference and tolerance level, but using bee venom two or three times a week is more than enough to achieve the desired effects,” says Fras.